


About the Rain

by sonyuei



Category: CIX (Band)
Genre: Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, but i didnt lmfaoo, byounggon need some damn therapy, like deadass i feel bad, this is really sad it would've been happier if i completed it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:27:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28199118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonyuei/pseuds/sonyuei
Summary: “I don’t know what you want me to talk about. I’m surviving, aren’t I?”Silence.“You aren’t living.”
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	About the Rain

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first, extremely rough draft of something that i began writing a while back (hence why it's so... mediocre) but i wanted to share it as i decided to give up on the full story which was initially going to be about five chapters with 4k words each. there is a small chance that i may pick this back up again and complete is as a full story, but right now i don't see that happening. i hope y'all enjoy the way my brain works at 4 AM lmfaooo.

He used to love the rain when he was younger. Though it only rained a few times each month, it always lasted for at least a day. He loved the feel of it. Loved seeing the mist it created temporarily hang over his city, loved the smell it left afterwards. Sometimes he’d dream of standing in the rain and letting it drench him, but he was too afraid of the cold that would come the day after. He especially loved the storms. The sound of the droplets making contact with his window calmed him in a way that nothing else ever could. At the small age of six he rearranged his room (against his parents’ will) just so his bed could be next to the window. The only thing he disliked about the storms was the thunder. He couldn’t stand how it made the ground shake and would hide under his blanket to try and protect himself from the noise. He even took the time to teach himself how to time his retreat under his blankets by observing the lightning.

Sometimes the thunder would last for just three seconds. Other times it would roll for up to twenty seconds, seemingly to fuck with him and everyone else listening.

Now, at the age of twenty-two, it didn’t make a difference to him. The feel, the smell, the volume of the storm, none of it mattered. It was always raining, be it due to climate change or due to mother nature having unfinished business with Seoul. It was always raining, but it no longer offered him comfort. No amount of thunder would be able to drown out the noise inside of his own head.

—

He listened to the hail rapping against his window as he stared through his wall. Today was a bad day. The past week and a half had already been terrible, but those days paled in comparison to what Byounggon woke up to. It was the first time he had locked his door in months, both preventing the other members from entering and reinforcing the mental block he had put up. It was also the first time he had missed breakfast, a meeting, lunch, dance practice, and over twenty collective texts and phone calls in the same day. At some point, the noises from the ice hitting his windows and his phone blowing up blended together and faded into the background.

As he came back to himself, he looked at the small analog clock that sat on his nightstand. Seven hours had passed. _Shit._ If his door was still locked when the others arrived home for dinner someone would break it down. Even with the knowledge that his bandmates can and would destroy the door to get to him, he didn’t get up to unlock it until he heard footsteps approaching his door.

“What the _fuck_ , Byounggon. Like actually.” Seunghun burst his way into the room and swiftly shut the door behind him. The older man was too worn out to scold his friend for the lack of honorifics. He was too worn out to respond all together, actually. “You can’t do this ever again. Ever. I’ve been trying to get through to you, Jinyoung has tried to distract you, hell even Soobin from TXT was worried enough about you that he texted me to make sure you were alright. We can’t support you if you won’t talk to us! Are you even-”

_-listening to me? Are you? You have a response for every damn thing I say, but you can’t even listen to me? You can’t do a single thing I ask of you. I didn’t raise you to be a lazy, disrespectful piece of shit. You’re-_

“-alright. You’re alright, Gon. It’s okay. I need you to breathe with me.”

_5... 4... 3... 2... 1…_

_5... 4... 3... 2... 1…_

_5... 4... 3... 2... 1…_

_His breathing slowed down. Even if just for a little while, his thoughts followed suit._

“Are you with me?”

“I… I’m here. Yeah.”

“I didn’t mean to overwhelm you, that’s on me. Truly. I’m just so worried about you, man.” Seunghun folded his hands and sighed, knowing he wouldn’t get any more responses from his friend tonight. “Yonghee ordered Thai for dinner. Come down and eat with us if you feel up to it.”

He didn’t eat with them. He didn’t even eat. He locked his door again, ignoring Hyunsuk’s pleas for him to eat the food he left outside of his door.

A part of him was wishing he would’ve been able to vocalize what’s been going on with him recently, explain that he physically couldn’t leave his room. That he couldn’t attend the meeting with the CEO, that he couldn’t pick up his phone, that he literally was not able to function. But he knew better. He knew that he had pissed off too many people to be given the privilege of an explanation. He wasn’t allowed to explain himself when he was younger _(your excuses don’t mean shit to me)_ and there was no use in hoping that things would be any different now.

Byounggon closed his eyes as he listened to the small pieces of ice make contact with his window, hoping that the sound would block out his inner turmoil for one night.

—

It wasn’t normal to consider throwing yourself into moving traffic while walking to buy microwavable ramen. Normal people didn’t have thoughts of _two cups of soy sauce flavored two cups of chicken flavored what if I let that car run over me and I fucking died and three cups of spicy ‘cause Yonghee is weird as hell._ That wasn’t a normal thought process, so he kept his mouth shut. He made his way through the earlier months of 2020 writing some of the darkest songs he’s ever written, never intended to be shared with the world. He cracked jokes about the actions committed by Yonghee’s character in the short films to ignore the part of him that wished that was his fate. He ignored and avoided truly addressing his issues because they were not of priority; his members had their own issues going and they didn’t need their leader to fall apart as well.

Byounggon pretended that everything was normal. He was normal. He was the normal, stable, and reliable leader that his group needed, and if it meant burying himself to get the job done then so be it.

His facade crumbled to pieces quicker than he expected. Looking back, it was devastatingly hilarious how all it took to break his dam was a lecturing comment from their choreographer. “What are you gonna do then? Hit me?” Everyone went silent almost instantly, as if the practice room itself was frozen in time. “You said it yourself, I’m disappointing you, right? Well what the fuck are you gonna do about it?”

Twenty minutes and a heated argument later, Byounggon was in the middle of the dorm’s living room floor with four pairs of arms around him as he cried. Oh, did he cry. When he could form coherent words, he tried to downplay his outburst as stress induced. It wasn’t a lie, but a huge understatement. Seunghun was the one who called him out on it _(Byounggon, I get it, I do, but that’s bullshit. You don’t say you deserve to be hit for a mistake because of stress)_ and was also the one he went to early the next morning and confessed stories of his childhood.

“Tell them when you’re ready. They won’t think any differently of you for the actions of someone else.”

And they didn't.

Byounggon was grateful for how understanding his members were, how no one outwardly judged him. He was so, so grateful, and he hated himself for not being able to keep it to himself. He was such a mess that he dragged the poor choreographer into his instability.

As he stood in the shower looking back at the recent events, he vowed to keep his shit to himself from then on. His members already knew about his broken childhood; they didn’t need to be burdened with knowing their leader wanted to fling himself off a roof.

Byounggon turned the knob all the way to the left and let the water scorch his skin.

—

He rarely hurt himself on purpose, at least not in the beginning. It was more for the sake of others than for him, but he still had something preventing him from doing it often. Byounggon didn’t need or want anyone knowing about how he handled his problems, and he definitely didn’t need anyone to worry.

The funniest thing to him is that it started off accidentally. He was reading through a hateful thread from some English forum at the asscrack of dawn and didn’t see the dining table in his peripheral vision; his thigh rammed right into its corner. As he sat on the edge of his bed a few hours later thinking back to some of what he read _(i truly don’t understand why people like his ugly ass lmfaooo he needs to crawl back to wherever the fuck he came from and leave those poor boys alone)_ , his hand unconsciously traveled to the newly formed bruise and started to press his fingers into it. Byounggon’s head began to clear as he was forced to focus on the pain instead. And so it began.

Byounggon always felt a sick kind of relief when he would fall during practice, when his shoulder hit a doorway, anything that would leave him with bruises he could press down on. He loved how the pain grounded him. Loved how his clumsiness granted him access to this relief without raising suspicions and leaving scars.

Sometimes when the bruises weren’t enough to calm his thoughts, he would get in the shower and let the water paint his body red. Sometimes he would do smaller things like drag his fingers across the edges of paper or snap rubber bands against his wrists; “no permanent marks” was his mantra. Sometimes he would put himself in situations that he knew would hurt him, make him cry himself to sleep or some shit. He would purposely fuck up a step to get Jinyoung to snap at him, say yes to things he didn’t feel comfortable doing, search his name with lovely keywords on Twitter. His method of _problem solving_ began to serve also as a punishment, and he couldn’t care less.

—

It was eleven at night when Byounggon heard a knock at his door. “It’s me, can I come in?”

Of course he could come in; Byounggon had never been able to say no to Seunghun. His inability to say no to him was how the two became friends in the first place, the older not possessing the willpower to run away from the endless amount of love the younger gave out for free. And so, they sat together in the middle of the older’s bed.

“You aren’t doing well, Byounggon.” Not a question. He very obviously wasn’t doing well, but not even his closest friend knew the extent of his unrest. It wasn’t important, though. Seunghun had his own struggles and his own issues to worry about and he didn’t deserve to be-

“-burdened with my bullshit. I’ll get through it.” Seunghun had the nerve to sigh at the man sitting next to him. “You might get through it, but you don’t have to get through it alone. You are not a burden to me. Never a burden. Not to me and not to anyone else.” Byounggon would usually say _thank you, truly,_ and end the conversation there. For some reason tonight, he didn’t.

“Same words in a different order. You’re not a burden, you’re not alone, it’s all tired bullshit, honestly. I’m already too fucked up for myself to handle, so there’s no way I’m putting this on anyone else. Worry about your own issues and I’ll take care of myself.”

“Do you remember what you told me when I said that exact same thing?” Byounggon glared at his hands. “You told me that I deserved to voice my pain. I deserved to accept support. That carrying my baggage alone could kill me.”

“We aren’t the same person.”

“Yeah? Well you’re a fucking hypocrite. You’re doing the same shit-”

”You can’t compare what you went through with my acting like a child.”

“I can’t compare it? You think I haven’t noticed you eating less? Or how you turn your phone off and spend entire days locked inside of your studio doing who knows what? Your face immediately drops when you think no one is looking, you float away in the middle of conversations, and I’m not even going to dig into the hot ass showers you take. I don’t know what’s going on in that brain of yours, Byounggon, but this isn’t good for you in any shape or form and I need you to talk to me. _Talk_ to me.”

If Seunghun was to do one thing, he would read his friend like a book. A deep intake of air was heard from the other, as well as the sound of weight shifting on the bed.

“I don’t know what you want me to talk about. I’m surviving, aren’t I?”

Silence.

“You aren’t _living_.”

—

Byounggon opens up to his notebooks before he opens up to anyone else. He pours his heart and soul into his lyrics, his pain and joy and fear and sadness all summarized on the pages of a tattered leather book, a sticky note, or even a napkin. Writing was what allowed him to hold onto the little sanity that still remained. He wrote dozens of verses that ranged from discussing his love of the people in his life to his lingering wish of death. He wrote about his inner turmoil and his view on his current walk of life.

He wrote about the rain.

The rain that soothed the worries of a younger him, a him that feared the sound of heavy footsteps and creaking of doors. The rain that dried his tears as he pleaded with the sky to take away his pain, to give him an explanation for why he had to suffer to alleviate the pain of someone else. The rain that welcomed him with loving arms as he sat on the ledge of his school’s roof, a text drafted to the only person he would've cared enough to miss.

Now, it was silent in the dorm aside from the sound of water making contact with the windows and the rolling of thunder. Four different sheets of paper sat neatly stacked on the kitchen table, waiting for the recipients of each one to wake up and retrieve them. As Byounggon sat against the wall of his room with a pen in one hand and a notebook in the other, he smiled. The rain was falling and falling and falling, and he would soon be falling and falling and falling.

He smiled.


End file.
